Showing its lack of familiarity with the human anatomy, the killbeast pointed the shotgun at the headless corpse, found the trigger with its odd rubbery fingers, and fired several times in rapid succession.
* * *
Jimmy, hearing the shots in the orchard, reached the house at a dead run. He entered the backdoor and was swept up in the welcoming arms of his mother.
“Sarah! Bili! There’s some kinda monster out there!” he sobbed into his mother’s dress. “It killed the jaxes!”
Sarah and Bili exchanged terrified glances. Sarah wrapped her arms around her Bili’s neck and shoulders, squeezing him tight.
“You two know what he’s on about, don’t you?” demanded Sasha Herkart. Her eyes squinted with suspicion; her otherwise comely face went taunt with dark lines. “You know about this. You came out of the forest like something was chasing you. Now you’ve brought it here!”
Outside, there was a renewed screaming from the jaxes milling about the yard. Something was among them, something was killing them. Sarah listened but there were no human sounds. There were no more shots, no more shouts, and the men didn’t come back.
“Where’s the cellar?” Sarah asked, heading for the kitchen. On the way past the home public-net terminal, she pressed the emergency call button three times and kept going. The woman followed, not seeming to hear the question.
“My man is out there fighting that thing. You should be out there. Those jaxes are all we have,” her voice wavered and she was trembling.
Sarah found the door to the cellar and she took Bili down the steps with her. Sasha and Jimmy stood at the top of the steps, uncertain. Jimmy rubbed at the spacer’s watch that Bili had given him as a present. His eyes were big and wet looking.
“Come down, we must hide,” called Sarah. She and Bili moved crates of wine away from the walls to make room for them to hide beneath the stairway. Sarah had her gun out and the safety was off.
“No,” said Sasha. “I’m going to get Dev.”
“Don’t do it,” said Sarah. The two locked eyes for a moment. Sarah could see the battle of emotions running through the woman. Jimmy, two years younger than Bili, began to cry. Suddenly, he turned and raced through the kitchen and out the backdoor. Sasha ran after him.
Sarah sprinted up the stairs after them, but hesitated at the top of the steps. The door had shut itself, so she opened it a crack, her pistol leveled. Bili waited behind her, panting in the dark. In the kitchen she could see the net terminal’s screen flare into life, it was the militia duty-sergeant, wanting to know what the trouble was. There was no one to answer him.
Sarah screwed up her courage and readied a simple plan of action. She would order the woman and her child back into the cellar at gunpoint and they would all wait for the militia. The militia could handle this. They had to handle it.
Two shotgun blasts rang out in the yard. Sarah’s plans crumbled. She and her son just stood there in the dark at the top of the cellar steps. Although she wanted to go further, a deep dread stopped her. It was as if an invisible wall, a barrier had sprung up at the top of the stairway. She couldn’t will herself to go further. After what she had seen in the forest, that creature, swimming through tough roots and stony soil like a walrus swimming through dirt, somehow she couldn’t bring herself to follow. She didn’t want to see any more aliens. She wanted to forget that she had seen anything at all.
When sounds finally did come, they were the stealthy, furtive sounds of something coming in from the night outside, quietly opening the backdoor. Taking great care lest the stairs creak, and cursing silently every time they did, they made their way back down into the black cellar on wobbly legs. Crawling into the alcove they had made beneath the stairway, Sarah and Bili pulled sacks over their bodies and rested their backs against a lumpy wall of preserved tubers.
Overhead, they could hear the creature as it roamed the house. The timbers creaked beneath its heavy tread, giving away its otherwise silent movements. After a quick survey of the house, the killbeast left, as yet not familiar enough with human dwellings to realize that there was probably a cellar worth investigating.
Outside, under the shining eye of Gopus, a pair of trachs moved among the dead. The trachs were table-like creatures with four powerful legs and a single, massive claw that they used to load the carcasses on their wide, flat backs. Their squat bodies were slow-moving, but fantastically strong, able to carry or drag thirty times their own weight. They were very thorough, preferring to head back to the nest only when they could carry no greater a load up the mountain. They picked the place clean of protoplasm, including the gibbets on the walls of the barn and the shorn limbs in the yard that glistened in the moonlight.
At last they made their final trip back to the tunnel entrances, stumping away toward the breach in the electric fence with the killbeast protectively hovering near, sensory organs quivering. Behind them the bodies of the jaxes, dogs and humans were gone. Only the bloodstains were left behind as evidence of the slaughter.
* * *
Deep beneath the polar mountains near New Grunstein, the Parent received her first nife commander while ensconced on her birthing throne. Approximately every two minutes she shifted her uncomfortably bloated body to a new position and released another larva from her birthing chambers. She was in full production now, with all four chambers working around the clock. Her birthing orifices had already grown quite sore.
The nife commander, fresh from the cocoon, was overconfident, overzealous and talkative. He was the first of his kind on Garm. The only true males of the Imperium, the nife leaders were the field commanders of the race. The Parents themselves ruled over them, of course, but often accepted the judgment of a trusted nife in military matters.
The nife swaggered up to the birthing throne, his exo-skin still glistening with the slimes of his cocoon. The Parent’s orbs tracked him carefully. Just to see him, after so long with no companionship other than the boring killbeasts and the nearly mindless trachs, sent a shiver through the Parent’s digesters. Here was stimulation of an entirely different sort.
“Welcome, offspring.”
“My birth was long in coming, but none the less glorious for it,” replied the nife with a flourish. “You are a welcome sight to my orbs as well, my Parent. Clearly, you are no loose-fleshed immaculate at the end of an over-stretched life span. You glisten with youth and beauty.”
The Parent ruffled her tentacles, affected by the nife’s words in spite of herself. It was good to hear praise again; especially when she felt it was true. She was, after all, still quite young physically. She felt that the years spent in cyro-sleep couldn’t truly be counted. “You flatter me in good taste, I am proud to have birthed you,” she replied formally.
“I will go further,” declared the nife, immediately growing exuberant at her approval. “I intend to capture this world and bear it back to this historic nest-site on the backs of ten thousand trachs. My glories shall outshine those of the Imperium’s Ancients, and lastly,”—he paused dramatically and extended his stalks so far toward the roof of the throne chamber that the Parent half-expected to see his orbs to pop out of their cusps, “I will win the right to meld with you and conceive the Imperium’s next generation of Parents!”
The Parent made a shocked sucking noise with her food-tube. “You overstep yourself! You are beyond the boundaries of decorum!”
“But my ambitions are boundless!”
“Your ambitions are the foolish dreams of the inexperienced,” the Parent snapped back severely. “Only I will choose whom I am melded with.”
“Of course, I meant only to state my goals.”
“You are fortunate that you are the first of your kind,” continued the Parent, her frontal clump of tentacles lashing the air in idle irritation. “There is no one for me to promote over you for your impropriety.”
Crestfallen, the nife seemed to shrink somewhat. His stalks drooped, and his orbs retreated again into his cusps. “I beg forgiveness.”
“I grant my forgiveness. Don’t presume upon my good favor again, however. Now, we must have a tasting of the fresh flesh the trachs are bringing in. Some of it may not be fit for the larvae to eat.”
“And some of it may be good enough to set apart for us,” amended the nife. His spirits and his stalks were on the rise again, seemingly he had already put the recent rebuke out of his mind.
While they were eating, delicately selecting chunks from the back of a patient trach, the Parent continued to gestate new offspring. With great regularity, more offspring larvae were unceremoniously birthed, coming out squirming and hungry into the chute behind the birthing throne. As soon as they appeared a small spider-like creature known as a hest trotted up on numerous churning feet and carried it away to its own individual supply of food, safely away from other ravenously hungry larvae. Located beneath the Parent’s four dripping orifices, the birthing chute was slick with amber resins. The resins produced a vile pungency that permeated the throne chamber.
“Exactly what are our strengths?” asked the Nife professionally, in military matters his genetics took over and he functioned well, despite his incredibly young age. “How many effective killbeasts, juggers and umulks do we have?”
“The initial complement upon landing was only six effectives.”
“Six?” asked the nife, incredulous. He almost dropped the shaggy jax haunch he had been gnawing on.
The Parent took a moment to slip her food tube into the skull of a jax and slurp out a good portion of the brain before continuing. “Of the task force only our one ship made it through. Fortunately, we have yet to encounter serious resistance. Our original complement included an arl, a killbeast, two trachs, an umulk and a culus with her ingrown shrade. Of that group, we lost only the arl in a planned diversionary maneuver.”
“Ah yes, I picked that up from the datastream briefing in my cocoon. A nice maneuver, sending off the majority of the ship with the arl to lead away the enemy’s atmospheric fighters. The umulk, of course, was a requirement for digging the nest. The culus and shrade, however,” the nife paused and made a gesture indicating perplexity. “I don’t understand your reasoning there, given how limited our defenses were. What if it had come down to an immediate fight?”
“Then the plan would have failed and we would all have died,” replied the Parent with an unconcerned shrug. “I deduce that you are thinking I should have birthed a second killbeast for security?”
The nife bobbed his stalks in assent, too busy with a mouthful of slippery intestines to vocalize a reply.
“You could be right, but I reasoned that if the landing ruse had failed, if it had come down to an immediate fight, then the whole invasion would have been a failure anyway. One killbeast wouldn’t have made the difference in such a battle. On the other hand, planning for the best case, getting the valuable military intelligence that the culus and shrade can provide is very helpful. Without them, we would be virtually blind right now. Proper reconnaissance is critical at this early stage.
“Your decision shows cunning and foresight.”
“Thank you. To answer your original question as to our strength, I can say that with your hatching we now have one nife, a battlegroup of killbeasts, a squad of umulks, three culus and shrade teams, two teams of trachs and six hests. In another forty-eight hours, we will have another four more battlegroups of killbeasts and more of each of the other types. At that time too, I will have to consider melding to conceive more daughters. One Parent can’t populate a whole planet alone.”
“What about juggers?” asked the nife immediately.
“I have jugger zygotes in the birthing chambers now, but have halted their gestation until we formulate our attack plans. They simply eat too much and can do no useful work other than in battle. It would be bad logistic practice to birth them too soon.”
At this the nife waved his claws briskly, signaling an emphatic negative. “I must differ with you and urge you to produce as many juggers as you can immediately. They take a longer time than most in the cocoon stage anyway, and we simply must have them for security purposes. For serious defense or offense, the killbeasts alone aren’t enough.”
The Parent ruminated on this a moment, mashing raw flesh with slow movements of her mandibles. “I bow to your greater genetic prowess in warfare. I am by nature conservative, perhaps too much so in an offensive campaign.”
“Secondly,” continued the nife. “There is the lack of arls to contend with.”
Again, the Parent shrugged. “We have no more need of pilots. There is no means of manufacturing imperial battlecraft on this planet, probably not for the duration of the campaign.”
The nife waved away her argument impatiently. “Of course not, but the enemy have such craft. We must be prepared to make use of their equipment, as we have no mass-transport technology of our own. For this reason maintaining a cadre of arls is essential.”
Again the Parent ruminated and assented to his judgment. Once the production goals were set, their attentions turned to the flesh they were consuming. Both found that they preferred the flesh of the humans slightly over that of the jaxes. Although it was more spare on the bone, it tended to have more flavor, probably due to greater variety in the diet. Both of them agreed after careful tasting of the limbs and abdomens of various specimens, that the female probably tasted the best. The flesh was soft and generally had a higher fat-content.